


Lonely Hearts Club (do you want to be with somebody like me?)

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (i made it more emo bc it me), F/M, IT’S MATT THE RADAR TECHNICIAN AS A STRIPPER EVERYONE, don’t even ask me how this au works I’m here for sinning, implied psychosexual abuse, in which your author apologizes for leaving you hanging for so long, in which your author got emotional about Alderaanian braids without really planning to, just know that things are Not as they are in the films, more serious tags for a more serious second and third act:, while being based in the sw universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-04-30 06:40:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14491056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: In which the stripper hired for Rose’s bachelorette party is an allusion to her profession.And then it gets serious.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hipgrab (merrymegtargaryen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrymegtargaryen/gifts), [Reylowhispers (jeeno2)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/gifts).



> Many thanks to [V](https://aionimica.tumblr.com) for looking this over.
> 
>  
> 
> [Nina](http://valsansretour.tumblr.com) helped me figure out a new title for this fic by pointing me towards [Marina and the Diamonds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeDe89NnC9M) since once I finished more than just the first chapter the old title didn't work anymore.

“I don’t think Rose will like it,” Rey says quietly.  Of all of them, she knows Rose the least well, but if she’s had one impression of Finn’s bride-to-be, it’s that Rose has strong opinions about oppression, and so the idea of them paying money for a sex worker to come to her bachelorette party seems like a hard no.

Paige, however, looks unconcerned.  “It’ll be fine,” Rose’s sister shrugs.  “Especially…” and she lets out a delighted yell of laughter and she shows the holo menu to Rey, Jessika, and Kaydel.  “They can send a _radar technician stripper!_ ”

 

-

 

She shouldn’t.  She knows she shouldn’t.  The whole point of a surprise stripper during a bachelorette party is that it’s a _surprise_ stripper.   But Rey doesn’t much want to be on Rose’s bad side.  Her loyalty is to Finn, not to Paige, so she corners Rose coming out of the mess hall a few days later.

“They’ve hired a stripper for your party,” she says quietly.  “Paige wants it to be a surprise, but I wasn’t sure if…it didn’t feel like the sort of thing…” she fumbles for words.  Rose is shorter than she is.  Rose is shorter than almost everyone she knows.  But Rose has a way of inflating when she’s angry such that even someone as tall as Chewie shrinks away from her.

But Rose doesn’t inflate. 

“Paige’s idea?” she asks, sounding resigned.

Rey nods. 

Rose heaves a sigh and closes her eyes.  Rey can see the war on her face—her principles that she is convinced that society’s participation in sex work is wrong, and unethical, and systemic, and all sorts of other things that Rey has only just started learning about doing battle with her love for her sister, and knowing that her sister is just trying to show her a good time for her bachelorette party.

When her eyes open, she gives Rey a small smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.  “Thanks for warning me,” she sighs at last.  “At least I can be…prepared, I suppose.”

 

-

 

The problem is, of course, that nothing could have prepared any of them for the radar technician stripper.

His costume is ridiculous—oversized glasses on his face, a hideous blond wig, an olive green jumpsuit and an orange vest.  He’s also _huge_ —broad of shoulders and about twice as tall as Rose is, and Rey suspects that somewhere under all of those layers of ridiculous costume, he’s absolutely shredded.  _He’d have to be,_ she thinks, _or else how on earth would he end up a stripper?_ Wasn’t the whole point of strippers that they were some sort of physical ideal?

He does not seem particularly pleased to be there, which makes the already tipsy giggles even more even more robust.  Maybe because he’s looking annoyed rather than sultry as he begins to dance to the bad electronic music that they have playing over the speakers, or maybe it’s because he scowls when Paige grabs him by the vest to plant a kiss on his neck.

“It is in line with the job,” Rose giggles to Rey.  “Nothing like struggling with calcinators.”

“Exactly,” the stripper says, nodding to Rose, his long face a little too serious. “ _Exactly_.”

“What’s your name?” Rey asks him, laughing at his fervor. 

His eyes flicker at the question and it’s as though he has to remember what his own name is when he replies, “Matt.”

“Well Matt,” Kaydel practically purrs, “You’re still wearing that hideous vest and I think it’s time that you take it off.  It clashes with your hair.”

Jessika let’s out a whoop that earns an eyeroll from Matt the annoyed and not particularly seductive radar technician and a moment later he’s removing the offending vest and tossing it aside.  It lands on Rey’s lap and a moment later, Rose is forcing her into it.

“That color doesn’t look good on anyone,” Rose laughs.  “I’m glad they’re not part of our uniforms.”

“It is for the pilots, though,” Rey sighs.  The idea of flying an X-Wing as Luke Skywalker had once done had become infinitely less appealing when she’d learned she’d have to wear bright orange while doing so.  Something about the color…it wasn’t right.  She’d have preferred just about any color to orange. 

“Not in the bomber squad,” Paige says cheerfully.

Matt’s just standing there listening, his face an odd mixture of curiosity and caution.  “You’re Resistance?” he asks.

“Not tonight we’re not,” Paige says.  “Tonight we’re just citizens of the Republic, just like you Matt.”

Matt doesn’t say anything.  He glances at each of them, before taking a deep breath as though centering himself. Then he unzips the front of his jumpsuit, revealing dark highwaisted pants underneath and—

Rey’s never really understood the obsession with bodies before, probably because Jakku had left her high and dry when it came to feeling anything apart from hunger or thirst.  But the moment Matt the stripping radar technician steps out of his jumpsuit, she can’t take her eyes away from his chest muscles.  He’d been sweating under all those layers and so his skin is smooth and gleaming.  And Rey finally understands what it means when she’s heard people mutter that they’d like to _lick_ the sweat off of someone else. 

She stares at him and maybe it’s her own mild inebriation or the fact that he’s focusing on Rose, the bachelorette, who is flushing at the sight of him too, but she isn’t even abashed at staring.  And when those pants come off…

Suddenly the room feels very hot, and Rey grew up on _Jakku_.  She’s used to heat.  She leans forward to grab her drink and Kaydel calls out, “Look, Matt!  You made Rey thirsty.”

“Give her more to thirst about,” Jessika croons, and a moment later his pants are coming down to reveal dark underpants that leave _little_ to the imagination about the size of the organ inside them and a fucking eight pack.  Rey’s mind can’t really take anything else in as she stares at him.

 

-

 

 

Rey wakes the next day with a throbbing headache, lying on Paige’s couch and her head spinning as much from the remainder of the alcohol as from memories of Matt’s body the night before.  He’d given each of them a lap dance—maintaining the character of the annoyed radar technician the entire time, and Rey had barely been able to breathe when he’d been that close to her.  She’d looked up at him, frozen like a frightened animal and somehow she’d made the foolish error of focusing on his eyes behind those ridiculous glasses because when she did that she could pretend that her own arousal was personal and that it meant something to both of them, that he was gyrating over her.  He had such lovely brown eyes, and as he’d danced over her, at moments she thought she’d caught moments of frustration fading into…she didn’t know what.  But whatever she saw there it mirrored what she felt.

She sits up and stretches. There’s a crick in her neck, and as she gets up she realizes that she’s still wearing Matt’s horrid orange vest.  With a groan, she realizes she should probably return it.  It’s not like any of them have a use for such a vest, and she may be a scavenger but she can’t quite bring herself to keep this.

 

-

 

 

Rey finds herself on a shady street, a forty minute trip from Paige’s apartment.  She had written down the address carefully when she’d called the agency to say that Matt had left behind part of his costume and she wanted to return it.  The agent on the other end of the line had sounded thoroughly uncaring as he’d easily given out Matt’s address.

Rey climbs up a set of stairs to the fifth floor and knocks on the door at the end of the hall.

There’s no answer.  _He might still be asleep_ , she thinks. She has no idea what time he’d left because it had definitely been after she’d passed out on the couch.  She knocks again.

“Coming,” she hears him call sleepily and a moment later the door is jerked open with a “What?”

It takes her a moment to recognize that this is, in fact, Matt. He’s not wearing the heinous wig anymore and actually has rather silky looking black hair.  He’s also not wearing glasses which means that the second their eyes lock, Rey feels heat flood her face because there’s nothing interfering with their gaze.

“It’s you.”  He sounds surprised, as though he’s in a dream or something.

“You left your vest at Paige’s last night,” she says weakly, extending it.

His gaze drops to her hands and she sees his cheeks flush.  “Oh.  Thanks. Thank you.”  He takes it from her—or makes to.  Her hands are having trouble letting go and when he looks back at her, Rey’s mouth goes dry.

Neither of them moves.  They just keep staring at one another and Rey knows she should say something, should say _anything_ but instead she’s just transfixed.  He’s got these little freckles on his face—darker and larger than her own. 

“Do you want caf?” he asks her at last.  “Late night and all that.”

Rey lets go of the vest.  “Yeah,” she says.  “I hear it helps with…” she points to her head.  The headache has gone down somewhat, but she wouldn’t call it totally gone.

“You hear?” he asks dryly.  “Baby’s first hangover?”

“Might be,” Rey says, trying not to get defensive.  “There aren’t a lot of bars on Jakku.”

“Jakku?” That gives him pause as he steps aside for her to pass him into the apartment.

It’s tiny, and messy, and there’s only one room to it, a mattress on the floor next to a kitchen counter.  Had she not grown up on Jakku, had she lived in a house, or an apartment, rather than a hollowed AT-AT shell, she might have sneered at the way Matt lived. Instead, she finds she likes it. It feels like his space—whatever he can make of it.

He pours her a cup of caf, then finds a dirty mug, cleans it, and pours it for himself. 

“Why’d you come?” he asks at last.  “You could have just dropped it off at the office or something.”  He doesn’t even pretend to look casual when he looks at Rey.  His dark hair is really distracting.  Somehow it makes sense for him—just as that yellow wig had not.  It makes him look…well…less like a stripper parody and more like a man.

A man who was shredded and who had danced his extremely well-muscled ass in front of her face the night before.  A man whose eyes she somehow found herself lost in if she looked at him for too long.

“I—” Rey takes a sip of her caf because she hadn’t been expecting to actually end up talking to him.  She doesn’t know what she’d been expecting, really.  To be nice? 

To see him again?

No one has ever looked at her the way that he’d looked at her last night, the way he’d looked at her when he’d opened the door, the way he’s looking at her now.  _Please,_ his eyes seem to say.

“I don’t know,” she says.  “But I’m glad I did.”

He seems to swallow not just with his throat but with his entire jaw as he looks at her, his nostrils flaring, his eyes nervous. 

“Me too,” he says quietly. 

Rey takes another sip of caf.  So does Matt.

She wants to say something, she wants to say something, but she can’t think of _what_ to say, but maybe if she starts she’ll think of something as she goes along.  She’s always been decent at improvising.

“Matt,” she starts, but he cuts her off.

“Ben,” he says quietly.  She cocks her head.  “My name’s Ben.  Matt’s the…the name I use when working.”

“That makes sense,” Rey says.  “I’m Rey.”

“I know.”

Of course he did.  _Look, Matt!  You made Rey thirsty._   Except that was wrong.  _Ben._ Ben made Rey thirsty.

Rey sets the mug down on the counter and steps towards him.  She hears his breath hitch and a moment later she’s standing right next to him, close enough to kiss.  She rests her hands on his chest, stands on her tiptoes and, heart pounding in her chest, presses her lips to his.

 

-

 

Rey’s never kissed anyone before, never had anyone she’s wanted to kiss before, but for all she feels as though her lips began fumbling against Ben’s when she’d first done it, she doesn’t feel that now.

Now, her lips taste fire on his skin as she sucks the vein in his neck.  He’s too tall to kiss on the lips, really, a good head taller than her, and she doesn’t like standing on her tiptoes for minutes on end and doesn’t want to stop touching him.  His heart is thudding in his chest as her hand rests right over it and his own hands are carding through her hair, tugging it loose from her ties, and Rey’s never had anyone touch her hair before, or at least not as long as she can remember. 

His fingers feel good there.  He’s rubbing her scalp, little circles that make her throat catch and her own fingers tighten on his shirt, as if she’s trying to reach for his thudding heart.  _Aren’t I?_ she wonders briefly to herself. It was loneliness she thought she’d seen in his eyes, twin to her own, and if he’s reaching for her head, why can’t she be reaching for his heart. 

When she’d been on Jakku, she’d been totally and thoroughly alone.  She’d wanted as little time near Plutt as possible, which had meant little and less time among the other scavengers who frequented the Niima outpost.  With the Resistance, through Finn and Rose and Poe and Jessika, she’d found the much longed-for set of friends, nearly dear enough to replace the family who was never coming back from her.  That had been intoxicating, to be wanted, to know that she made a difference in a good way to that circle. 

But that’s not this, she realizes as heat unrolls from her stomach through the rest of her.  That’s not the way that Ben had seemed to beg her _please.  Please care about this.  Please care about me.  Because I care about you_.  Because somehow she knew he did.  Somehow she’d stumbled upon this man and if she had no desire to keep the orange vest he’d left behind, his heart…

His heart is another matter.

Rey tugs at his shirt and he strips it off—far more perfunctorily than the night before.  She knows he has an eight-pack already, she has seen him bare—and a moment later she’s kissing her way across his chest.  There’s no sweat to lick off now, and he tastes a little like soap, and as she presses her face into his heart, he presses his into her hair, his arms coming to wrap around her, to hold her as tightly as if he planned to never let her go. 

She peeks up at him, but his face is buried in her hair so her eyes settle on the spot on his neck that she’d been kissing.  The skin is darker there, blooming a discoloration from her lips that makes something in her seem to glow with delight.  She’d scavenged him and he’s hers now.  He’s holding her like she’s his, but he’s hers too.

His heart is thudding so loudly into her skin that she can’t think of anything except him.  The whole galaxy could be falling apart and she wouldn’t know it because he’s there, solid and clear in her arms.

She kisses his heart again, and makes to pull away from him.  She sees a look of panic cross his face but she takes his hand and leads him towards the mattress on the floor, and pulls him down onto it.  She straddles his hips and her lips find his and she smiles into them because like this, they are equals.  She doesn’t have to strain up to kiss him, and he doesn’t have to bend down to kiss her.

His tongue slips tentatively into her mouth and she squeaks.  It feels strange—a bit slimy, but he tastes like caf and he licks along her tongue, stroking it and she begins to settle. Strange, but good.  Sort of like how Matt had looked last night with his eight-pack and his horrible wig.  She tries rubbing her tongue against Ben’s and he makes a little noise of appreciation in his throat.  She likes that.  And, she decides, she likes the strange wet feeling of his tongue in her mouth. Strange doesn’t have to be bad, and it won’t be strange for long.  She’ll grow used to it, she knows.

Because she’s not letting him go, and he’s not letting her go. 

So there will be more of this.  More of the way his tongue makes her sigh and her whole body melt into him, more of his heart hammering against hers as though straining to pump right through his chest and into hers, more of his hands in her hair, making her feel safe, making her feel wanted.  And, knowing that there will be more fills Rey with a hunger she’d never experienced before in her life.

Rey has starved, Rey has thirsted, Rey has made resources last as long as they possibly can out of need.  But Ben’s body is an oasis and Rey kisses her way down his neck, across his collarbones, nipping there.  She licks at his skin just to taste it and when his hands drop from her hair to the hem of her shirt to tug it up and off, she realizes how much she’d needed the feeling of his skin against hers when he pulls her face back to his to kiss her, to keep her body flush against his. 

He topples her, pushing her onto the mattress so that he can hover over her, his lips following the trail she’d just forged over his skin.  He sucks at her neck, at her collarbones at her sternum, inching his way down between her breasts, where he pauses and looks up at her. He doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t look away from her when one of his huge hands comes to thumb at her nipple and an “oh,” escapes Rey’s lips. 

“Ok?” he asks her.

“Yeah,” she says.  “Don’t stop.”

And his lips are on her nipple now, his tongue circling over the skin and Rey cries out when his teeth lightly graze it.  He pauses and looks up at her again and she laughs breathily as she says, “I said don’t stop.”  So he goes back to it and Rey does her best to stay still but her back keeps arching towards him—especially when his hand goes to play with her other breast, pushing at the whole thing before taking the sensitive tip and twisting at it lightly. 

Rey doesn’t really know when her hands found his hair—just that they did and it’s so very soft, and clean, and silky.  When she’d scavenged, it had only ever been for metal parts, and if she’d stumbled upon fabric, it was always functional fabric.  Ben’s hair is a luxury beneath her fingers, his lips are a luxury against her chest, his heart is a luxury and Rey isn’t used to luxury. 

 _I don’t deserve this,_ she thinks and tears prickle at her eyes and suddenly.  _There’s a reason I’ve never had this before, never wanted it._

It’s as if he had heard her, somehow.  He pauses again and looks up and when he sees her face his lips are against hers again, his fingers tracing her cheeks.  “Too much?” he asks her quietly. 

 _I could never get enough of you,_ Rey thinks sadly.  Instead of saying that, though, she kisses him.  “It’s all new,” she says.  “Being wanted.”  That’s not a lie, and he can think she means her body if he wants. 

But he does that thing where he swallows with his whole jaw and murmurs, his voice thick, “Don’t be afraid.  I feel it too.” 

And she sees that in his star-deep eyes.  She sees that in the heart she never wants to let go and suddenly she’s not afraid anymore.  Because if he deserves to be wanted, she does too—and how she wants him.  She wants him and, what’s more, she has him.  Can have him.  Will have him. 

She pushes him back off her so that she can kiss her way down his chest again, lick her way between those defined abdominal muscles, and when she reaches the low waistline of his pajama pants she glances up at him, asking without words.  He nods and she pops the band gently over him and down his legs and when she looks at it, looks at him, her breath catches.

She’s seen penises before.  She’s even seen _human_ penises before—mostly in the communal showers at the Resistance headquarters.  But she’s never seen an erect human penis before and Ben’s is huge.  At least she thinks it is.  It’s certainly bigger than the flaccid ones she’d seen.  It’s a deeper red than the rest of his skin, flushed with want of her and she kisses her way up his legs and buries her nose against the base of it, sniffing at the skin at the base and sighing because she likes how he smells, all musky and oddly spicy with a faint hint of soap. 

She licks her way up his cock, and his breath catches when she circles the tip of it with her tongue.  Fluid that looks milky but tastes salty and almost bitter leaks out and she drinks it in before saying, “I don’t know how to do this.”

“I can teach you,” he tells her, swallowing—just with his throat now, not with his jaw, “If you want to.  You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Rey wants to.  She wants all of him and if she’s hungry, if she’s thirsty, if she’s wanting, and he’s an oasis…she drops her mouth down over him, the girth of him filling her mouth, locking her tongue against her jaw as she takes him as deep as she can go before she starts to gag.  His hands are in her hair again and as she pulls her mouth off him, his fingers tighten. She can hear him breathing heavily through his nose, and when she wraps her hands around the part of him that doesn’t fit into her mouth and begins to rub her drool along his shaft, she can feel him throbbing in her hands, feel his pulse under her fingers. 

She looks up at him as her motions steady and his eyes aren’t quite closed but they aren’t focused either.  He’s watching her, and she sees eternity in those deep brown eyes.

She starts to move her head faster, to take him in deeper, brushing along the edges of what will make her gag.  She tries to wiggle her tongue against him and when she does he chokes out a word she doesn’t understand and beneath her hands she feels an almost buzzing sensation in his cock.  She does it again, her grip tightening slightly and a moment later he’s spilling into her mouth and Rey drinks him down because she wants to and because she can.

He lies there for a moment, his eyes closed, his nostrils flared.  Then he sits up and presses a kiss to the top of her had, two fingers under her chin, drawing her back up his body so that he can wrap his arms around her and hold her close to his pounding heart.

How wonderful it is to just be held.

Her body longs for him but her heart—it longs for this, to just be curled against his chest, to have his lips in her hair—not kissing her, just resting there, just breathing her in, just wanting her.  There’s such peace in the rise and fall of his chest under her, and Rey closes her eyes and lets herself sink into the warmth of him, melt into him.

His hand is rubbing up and down her spine.  No one’s ever done that before.  The trail his fingers leave is cooling, calming.

In each up and down, his hand dips lower until he is gripping her ass, massaging the muscles he finds there.  He kisses the top of her head slowly and his hand goes under her pants and rubs against her skin.

“What do you want?” he asks her quietly.  “I can’t…well, I don’t think I’d be ready for more for a little while at least.  But I can get you off another way if you want.”

She looks up at him.  His eyes are lazy, his face relaxed and he looks so much younger than he does when he’s tense. 

Heat creeps up her face.  “I don’t know what I want,” she tells him quietly.  “I…I haven’t done this before.  So I guess however you want?”  She doesn’t mean to sound timid.  She’s not a timid person.  She could never afford to be timid.  But somehow she knows she can show Ben her underbelly, the heart of her vulnerability, and he will keep her safe.

He nods and he rolls her over so she’s on her back again, then he gets on his knees and crawls down the bed.  Prickles erupt across Rey’s skin, and she suddenly feels cold because he’s not underneath her, warming her.  He shucks her pants down her legs and settles himself between her legs, looking up at her. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he runs a thumb along her slit.

She hadn’t realized how wet she was until that very moment.  She’s been wet before, has touched herself before, but this is wholly new.  It’s like he’s turned _her_ into an oasis and her whole body jerks because of the way that wetness makes his thumb feel against her. “Kriff,” she chokes out, and Ben gives her a cheeky grin before ducking his head down and licking and Rey writhes and doesn’t feel cold anymore.  Her heart is pounding in her chest and there are waves of heat rolling from her cunt up through the rest of her and when he takes her clit in his mouth she swears she can feel every nerve in her body.  She can the crashing of waves against rocks though she’s never seen the sea, can feel a breeze that’s not there over her skin.  She wants to swim in the sensation of it all, push herself into it because she feels alive in a way that she hasn’t before, bright in a way that only the Jakku sun had ever seemed.

She swallows, her eyes open but it’s as though she is seeing things that aren’t there every time Ben’s tongue presses against her.  It’s as though she can feel the life of every person within a mile’s radius, but none of them shine so brightly as Ben between her legs. What a beautiful glimmer he is, and as he slips fingers into her, curls them up inside her, Rey reaches for him without reaching for him and—

Ben’s head jerks up, his hand twitching inside her and he stares at her, as though suddenly terrified of her.  His nostrils flare and the corners of his mouth are turned in a frown and a moment later she feels…she doesn’t know what she feels.  It’s as though that wave she can hear without hearing is washing over her now, except it’s not a wave because it smells like Ben, feels like Ben.

“What—” is all she manages to say before it’s gone completely and the sudden sensation of _thereness_ of whatever that Benness was and it’s sudden absence leaves her spinning and gasping for air as her body contracts and trembles around his fingers.

He pulls his fingers out of her as her head stops spinning and his face still looks wildly perplexed as he crawls back up the mattress to her. 

He doesn’t take her in his arms. 

The weight of that is crushing.

“What was that?” she asks him, sounding small, hating the way that even as her body feels relaxed and warm, her heart is tight in her throat.

“You don’t know?” he asks her sharply.

Rey shakes her head.  Ben’s eyes bore into her, hot and angrier by far than he’d been as Matt.  But that anger drains away quickly and a moment later he’s pulling her to his chest and holding her and the lump in her throat fades when the solid heat of him washes over her.

“What was it?” she asks again.

“Something I wasn’t expecting,” he mumbles into her hair.

“Bad?”

“Not from you.”

Rey looks up at him and his eyes are bright all of a sudden and he looks almost like a boy now.  She kisses him.  He tastes like her—and she tastes like him, she’s sure.

“What was it?” she asks a third time, and his chest expands slowly as he takes a deep breath.

“The Force,” he tells her quietly, and his arms tighten around her. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I,,,uh,,,,sorry for making you wait this long. I almost never write-as-I-post which means that I legit just…forgot to keep working on this. But the rest (note the chapter count change) is now drafted and so I won’t keep you hanging this time.
> 
> I changed the title of the fic bc, when I sat down to finish, the old title didn’t fit the rest anymore. 
> 
> I encourage you to check out the more serious tags for triggers/squicks for the next two installments. If you want to know more details about what stuff’s gonna look like to gauge what you want to read, drop a line and I’ll clarify in greater detail for you!

_The Force._

His words ring in her ears long after he kisses her goodbye, leaning against the doorframe to his tiny apartment.

She can’t stop thinking about them.  he can’t stop feeling it—noticing it constantly. It’s like she’s awake now. It’s like she’s hyper aware of her body, of her mind. Sometimes, she reaches out to see if it’s still there and it is, and every time she does she thinks of Ben’s tongue and his arms around her.

She waits all of three days before she goes to his apartment again.

He’s not there, but Rey’s always been good at waiting, so she settles herself on the floor outside his apartment, crosses her legs, and breathes.

 

-

 

Ben is long in arriving. It’s late, and Rey’s nearly asleep when he shows up wearing a very skimpy looking outfit that he’d clearly put on hastily. His skin has a dried-sweat look to it and he stops short when he rounds the corner from the elevator and sees her sitting there.

He doesn’t say anything right away, he just stares at her. Then, “How long have you been waiting?”

Rey wants to say _since the last time I saw you,_ but she doesn’t think that’s right so she shrugs. “A while.”

He swallows and extends a hand and helps her to her feet. She hadn’t realized how stiff her legs had gotten until she’s standing next to him. He smells like sweat and he’s so warm and she wants to bury her face in his chest, but instead she looks up at him.

“How did you know it was the Force?” she asks him.

His jaw tightens and he unlocks the door to the apartment and leads her inside. “I want to use the ‘fresher,” he says quietly. _He’s avoiding the question._

“Can I—” Rey begins before her tired mind catches up with her lips.

Ben has gone into the bathroom, and she hears water start to run, and a moment later he pops his head out. “Did you want to join me?” he asks nervously. “Was that what you were—”

“Yes.”

Which is how she finds herself squeezed against him in his tiny ‘fresher. It’s really not big enough for two people—especially when Ben is as broad as he is. He doesn’t say much as he soaps himself up, his hands running not so much seductively over his muscles as perfunctorily under his arms, up and down his neck and, with a slight blush, over his cock.

When he reaches for his shampoo, Rey asks, “Can I do it?” and he pauses. Then he hands her the bottle and she squirts some of it into her palms. Then she reaches up and begins to lather the soap into his hair. He sighs under her hands.

“I can’t remember the last time someone washed my hair for me,” he whispers.

“Me neither,” Rey replies. She wonders if Ben will ask to wash hers. She’d washed it that morning, doesn’t have anything she might want to wash out of it now—she mostly just wants his hands in her hair again, his presence superseding her need to understand.

He drops his head to rest his lips against her shoulder, to suck her skin between his lips and he keeps humming contentedly under her touch. Part of her wants him to get hard, to push himself into her in this ‘fresher, to make her blood boil until he runs out of hot water and they have to take it to the mattress.

But he doesn’t get hard. He doesn’t even while his hands come to wrap around her waist, holding her close to him. He doesn’t even when the suds in his hair have all been washed away and it’s just her fingers rubbing his scalp. And when the water does, at last, run cold and he turns it off, and leads her out of the ‘fresher.

He only has one towel, which he uses to dry himself before handing it to her. Then, wordlessly, he leads her to the mattress and curls around her, burying his face in her neck and just breathing.

“I know it was the Force because I was trained in the Force,” he says quietly to her. “Because the Force has been too much a part of me.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

He swallows, and shakes his head, and says nothing for a very long time. Then, at last, “It wasn’t good for me. It wasn’t good to me. But it’s not bad from you.”

“I don’t—”

He shakes his head again and he’s trembling now and Rey runs her fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him. “It’s all right,” she whispers. “You’re safe. It’s all right.”

“It’s not,” he whispers. “I’m not, and it’s not.”

 

-

 

She gets more out of him in bits and pieces.

It has to be bits and pieces—if she spends as much time in his tiny apartment as she wants to, she gets a dressing down by command because she should know better than to disappear from base for that long. She explains this to him tearfully when he asks her when he’ll see her again.

“I will be back,” she promises him.

“I know,” he says, swallowing, his eyes too bright.

“No—I mean it. I promise. I won’t—I won’t leave you waiting.” Which is how he learns about Jakku, about her parents, about waiting and waiting and waiting until you forget what you’re waiting for.

He holds her tightly, and kisses the top of her head until her heart calms down.

It’s bits and pieces because she’s put on more reconnaissance runs that take her out into the stars for longer stretches of time and when she is back on world and pelting into his apartment, he spends more time licking her into oblivion and holding her to his chest because she’d managed to avoid five First Order TIE fighters on her tail.

“I think it was the Force?” she whispers to him. “When I fly. Or when I was flying. I just knew where to go to avoid them.”

“It heightens your reflexes,” he replies noncommittally. Then, after a deep breath, “That’s what I miss the most.”

“About the Force?”

“Yes. Feeling like nothing can catch me,” he lets out a wry snort. “Not of course that that helped anything. The physical was always fine. It was the—” He does not continue. He buries his face in her neck as she has noticed he does when he’s upset and she runs her fingers through his hair.

She notices it in her reflexes more after he says that. She’s always had good reflexes—it’s what made her as daring a scavenger as she’d been on Jakku. But now, she feels that light inside her when she’s moving. She feels it when she’s training. She feels it when she’s flying. This lightness—something that had always been a part of her somehow, a sort of Reyness, as she’d found Benness with his tongue at her slit, with her fingers in his hair.

 

-

 

“Girl that is an intense hickie you have there,” Paige tells her with a gleam in her eye and Rey claps a hand to her neck.

She’d worn a shirt that has a higher collar today because Ben is particularly attached to one part of her neck. And it’s not as though she doesn’t like it when he isn’t kissing her neck.

“So,” Paige says with a wink. “Who’s the lucky fella? Or gal. Person. Who’s the lucky person?”

Rey swallows. She’s neither a liar nor a coward, but this isn’t exactly the way that she’d wanted to tell people about Ben.

“You remember Matt?”

“The,” Paige waggles her eyebrows, “Radar Technician?” Then her eyes go wide. “You _aren’t_.”

 

-

 

He plays with her hair.

No one’s ever done that before. She thinks even her parents never did that, tying her hair into three little buns to keep it out of her face and to keep it in place, not because they thought it looked cute. Ben weaves braids into her hair, turning her head into a work of art. When she tries to weave braids into his hair, though, he grabs her wrists.

“You like it when I play with your hair.”

“Braiding my hair has meaning.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m Alderaanian.”

Rey doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean. She just knows that the General is from Alderaan, and sometimes she wears her hair in braids.

“You braid my hair. Does that have meaning?”

He swallows and she realizes she’s caught him in something. “Yes,” he says at last. “Because you mean something to me.”

He’s looking at her nervously again, like she’s going to be repulsed by the confession, like she will laugh at him.

“You mean something to me too,” she says quietly, and raises her hands to his hair again. And this time, when she pulls him inside her, it’s like there’s something electric between them, and it takes Rey a moment to realize that that’s the Force, flowing not just from her but from him as well.

He mostly unweaves the braids from her hair whenever she leaves. But after that, he leaves one in place—a small one that she tucks behind her right ear.

“What’s special about this one?” she asks him and he presses his lips to her forehead.

“There are two things,” he says. “The first is that you have someone special.” She grins up at him and his eyes get so soft that she reaches up to cup his cheek with her hand. Then his eyes unsoften. They don’t go hard, but they aren’t soft. “The second is that it’s where Jedi Padawan used to wear their training braids. They wouldn’t have the rest of the hair. I thought you might like that.” He looks wary again.

“Did you wear one once?” she asks quietly.

He swallows.

And nods.

 

-

 

“I used to hear voices in my head,” he tells her once he’s spent himself the next time he sees her. She’s lying there on his chest and his cock is still inside her, slowly going limp, but neither of them move just yet. She likes him there even when he’s not hard, and she gets the impression that he does too. “I thought they were imaginary friends when I was really little. They always were so nice to me even when everything was—not good. The older I got, the sterner they got. They made me angrier. Made me darker. My mom sent me off to train, and I tried but the voices only got stronger as I did. I thought I was going insane. I thought I was going to hurt people. I thought I was going to hurt myself. That’s the Force too.” She can feel the way his heart is pounding beneath her chest, as though he’s going to fight, going to fly. “Darkness. Death. Light. Life. It’s all there. But it’s not always balanced.”

“So you stopped training?” she asked.

“My master—he saw it in me. And I ran. I cut myself off from it as best I could.”

“Did the voices go away?”

“I don’t think they can find me if I’m cut off from it.”

She kisses his neck and his heart starts to relax and soon he is asleep.

 

-

 

She wears the braid as subtly as she can. She tucks it into her own buns, a little ornament, a secret intimacy that most on the base won’t understand. How can they? And, more importantly, what would a scavenger from Jakku know about Alderaan’s braiding traditions? It can’t be anything more than an ornament, something she’d put in there for fun. Meaningless. Harmless.

 

-

 

“Is that why you live like this? Because you’re hiding?”

Ben gives her a sharp look. “You think my job’s beneath me?”

“No,” Rey protests at once, even as the back of her mind says, _yes_. He could be a _Jedi._

Guilt wracks her at that. She knows how hard he works, knows what he does not tell her about the drain of it. She even knows, buried in his refusal to answer her question, _why_ it is he’d started doing it, knows him well enough to know that he’ll let others use his body so long as his mind is safe.

It’s the first night that Ben doesn’t cradle her in his arms as they fall asleep together, and when she wakes the next day to head back to base, he pretends to be asleep.

 _I ruined it,_ she thinks sadly.

But she doesn’t undo the braid.

 

-

 

She goes back. She refuses to let herself think that it’s _over_ even if she ruined it until Ben tells her he doesn’t want to see her anymore.

She sits outside his apartment until she falls asleep and wakes up when a neighbor is leaving for work the next day and nearly trips over her.

Every muscle in her body protests as she stands to knock on his door. She reaches out—not to see his mind, but to sense his Benness, to see if he’s inside.

She doesn’t know if she’s relieved or not when the apartment is empty.

 

-

 

She tries not to cry when her hair gets so dirty that she has to undo the braid to wash it. She tries to recreate it, but her fingers are too thick and unpracticed and it looks like a mess. _Because you mean something to me._

She goes back to his apartment. It’s still empty. She wishes she doesn’t wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t said anything at all and then he’d given her a key to the place.

 

-

 

She gets better at braiding her own hair. Even though it’s nearly a month now that she hasn’t seen him. She’s gone to his apartment with some regularity. It remains empty. Once, she even asks his neighbors if he might have gotten kicked out, or if they’ve seen him recently, but they just shrug and shake their heads.

In a moment of desperation, she calls the agency that Paige had used to book him in the first place and her heart lurches in terror when they say they haven’t heard from him in weeks, but they have back pay and a termination notice for him because this sort of behavior is really unacceptable and—

She doesn’t even take in the rest of it.

 

-

 

She doesn’t have many run-ins with the General. General Organa is one of the more important people in the Resistance, with too much on her plate for a low-level star fighter like Rey. But she thinks she catches the General staring at her ugly attempts to recreate Ben’s braid in her hair and her eyes seem to get all misty before she looks away.

It’s the most emotion she’s ever seen on the older woman’s face.

And maybe it’s because she thinks there was wistfulness in the mistiness, or maybe it’s because she just misses him so much but when Rey returns to her bunk that night and curls up facing the wall, she closes her eyes and reaches out as far as she can for that familiar feeling of Benness.

 _Please_ , she thinks as she reaches. _Please, Ben. Where are you?_

Not in the city where he has worked, not on the entire system, she thinks. He’s just—gone.

 _I don’t think they can find me if I’m cut off from it,_ he had told her.

_But what if I want to find you?_

_Couldn’t you have at least said goodbye?_

 

-

 

She tries again every night that week, and the next week, and the next.

Her fingers get better at weaving the braid. It becomes tighter, neater. It looks almost as though Ben had woven it himself.

 

-

 

She tries when she is flying reconnaissance—because maybe he’d left Hosnian and let his guard down. But nothing.

She tries when she passes First Order star fighters in skirmish. But all the presences she feels on board those ships are unfamiliar to her.

It’s like he’d never existed.

Except, like her parents, he had.

 

-

 

And then, one day, when she’s reaching out—

It is like a hand scrabbling for purchase when its owner is about to fall to their death, except it is not a hand; it is Benness and tears fill her eyes and she almost forgets to fly because he’s flooding towards her now, desperate and afraid and she doesn’t know what to do.

He’s on a starship—the one that’s ahead of her, the one that is almost impossibly huge, larger even than a Dreadnaught.

 _I’ll come for you,_ she thinks to tell him, but almost immediately she feels him pulsing _No. No, don’t let him touch you. Stay safe. I love you. Please—_

_I’m not leaving you. I told you I wasn’t leaving you._

And then he’s gone and Rey yells in pain, in fury, in fear.

Through the commlink, Poe says, “What’s going on?”

“Ben,” Rey sobs. “They have Ben.”

And it’s only when Poe says, “Ben…Solo?” into her ear that Rey realizes she doesn’t even know Ben’s last name.


	3. Chapter 3

“He braided your hair,” the General tells her softly, reaching her hand up to run her fingers over the braid. Her gaze is misty again.

“I didn’t know—he never talked about his family,” Rey whispers. Just that his mother had sent him off to a teacher who couldn’t help him. She had just that he hadn’t gone back to his family when he’d fled the voices in his head, the darkness that they stoked.

“Snoke,” the General whispers angrily turning away. She stares out at the stars. “I won’t let him keep my son. I won’t.”

But how they are going to get him out, Rey doesn’t know.

 

-

 

Now that she knows where she is, she starts to breathe more easily. There’s a speed in her step that she hadn’t noticed was missing until the words _I love you_ had drifted across her mind in Ben’s voice.

Every time she braids and unbraids her hair, she thinks of him and fury fills her. She won’t leave him there to the voices in his head. She won’t. She swore to herself years and years before she’d never be the sort of person who just abandoned someone.

 _I love you,_ she wills across the stars, wondering if he will feel it.

She is met with emptiness.

But she is used to that.

That is Jakku.

But unlike Jakku, she knows—she _knows_ —that someone on the other side of it all loves her too. 

 

-

 

They can’t think of a way to extract him. There are no prisoners for exchange, and the General is adamant that they can’t give Snoke any knowledge of an upper hand. For all he knows, they are entirely ignorant that he holds her son. It will make whatever he is planning that much less impactful—or so Leia hopes.

But the more time they spend, the more anxiety gnaws at Rey. She remembers Ben breathing into her neck for comfort, Ben holding her close, shuddering as he remembered what it was like not to be alone in his own head. The longer he is there, the more Rey is filled with the need to do _something._

Which is how she finds herself in Poe’s quarters with Finn, Paige, Jessika, Kaydel, and Rose, formulating a plan that Poe knows will either get them all promoted or dishonorably discharged.

“Or dead,” Paige adds seriously. It needed to be said out loud—all the possible outcomes to make sure that they all knew they were in it together.

“You think you can do this?” Finn asks her quietly.

“I don’t know,” Rey said. “I never know until I do it.” That had always been how it had been. The Force, perhaps. Or just her own tenacity. A dangerous combination, she rather suspected. She runs her fingers absentmindedly along the braid.

_Because you mean something to me._

_It’s where Jedi Padawan used to wear their training braids._

Well, she wasn’t a Jedi Padawan, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to at least _try_ to test herself.

Kaydel runs a distraction on the bridge and Rose sets off a distraction in Hangar B so that no one notices when five fighters take off from Hangar A and have disappeared into the stars before anyone on the _Raddus_ is any wiser.

When she pulls out of hyperspace, Rey reaches out again. She feels him there, weaker than before, more tired, and also hears a _no you were supposed to_ before another voice presses into the front of her skull.

_Aha. So you did come back. I was wondering._

The voice is rich, and deep and it makes Rey’s skin crawl. It laughs, and says, _Five X-wings? That’s daring of you. And all to save your little lover?_

She inhales sharply.

 _Ah yes. I know about that._ as though he is in her own mind now as she feels Ben’s lips on her skin, his sighs, his beating heart. She can practically see her own hand pumping at Ben’s cock in her mind’s eye, the look of elation on his face as he runs his hands along the braid.

_But you have also made him weak. Sentimental._

_But it’s no matter. You’re here now. And that weakness will be gone soon._ The pressure fades and something new crosses her awareness now.

“On your left!” she shouts and Poe replies,

“I see ‘em! Beebee-ate old buddy, you ready for some moves?”

TIE Fighters are streaming out of the giant space ship and Rey lets her instincts take over as they break formation.

“Stay on plan!” Poe commands into the link.

“He’ll know everything we are planning,” Rey says. “He can read minds.”

“Well, then we’ll just have to be unpredictable,” Poe says and he spins off towards the stars, taking at least five TIEs with him.

“Because that’s how that works,” Jessika says dryly, but even as she does, she shoots off in another direction.

“I’ve got your back,” Finn tells Rey.

“No. He’ll expect that. Get away.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Finn—” but even as she begins to speak, that voice presses into the front of her mind again.

_The little traitor is your friend, then? Oh, this keeps getting better and better._

And the pressure is gone from her head and she jerks her controls away from Finn, panic flooding her. Yes, she’d known that they might die, had known that they were all risking their lives for her, for Ben, but the idea that Finn might get singled out.

She can just imagine what Snoke must think right now. A lovesick girl, blinded by her loneliness, willing to risk the lives of her friends for—

_I love you._

The words are different in her mind now—not a memory. Lighter, softer, gentler, Benner than the horrible pressure she’d felt only moments before. He is curled around her, pressing into her and the difference is everything. _Thank you,_ his words are fleeting.

_What for?_

_You’re here. He’s focused on you._

And she catches it—the hint of a plan, the hint of an idea and she fills her heart with thoughts of Ben, floods her minds with every fond memory she has of him, from the moment she’d first seen him in that dumb ridiculous wig to when she’d sat waiting for him to get home so that she could bury her face in his chest again.

She turns her X-wing around and pelts through space, taking out two surprised TIE fighters as she does.

 _Your friends haven’t taken out the shields, foolish girl. Your torpedos can’t touch me,_ Snoke laughs in her mind. _Or are you sacrificing yourself for him? A suicide run right through the shields? They’re strong enough to withstand that you stupid little—_

She feels Ben pause the oscillator and she fires.

She watches as the glass on the bridge shatters. She thinks of Ben and her fingers tighten on the trigger again and they fire right at where Snoke is sitting, even as he gasps for air, space vacuuming away the air he had been breathing.

Her ears explode with cheers and Rey gasps in time with Ben, somewhere down in the ship.

“All right, let’s find him and get out of here!” Poe calls into the commlink.

“You make it sound easy,” Finn replies dryly.

“Everyone just stay clear,” Rey says. “Just stay clear.”

 _Where do I find you?_ she thinks to Ben.

But before words fill her mind again, she feels him—power pulsing in a way that fills her entire mind and body, flooding through the entire ship as Ben rips himself from the room he’d been kept in. She can feel as though it’s her own hand that reaches in the air and freezes blasts that are being thrown his way by surprised stormtroopers, and it’s as if it’s her own heart that’s pumping life through his body as he breaks free.

No one can touch him.

No one can match him.

No one—except Rey.

He freezes cannons that have aimed themselves at her as she makes her way towards the nearest hangar, he malfunctions the blasters that stormtroopers have aimed at her and when she sees him pelting across the hangar towards her ship, she opens the top hatch and he leaps—agile, light—up onto the wing and heaves himself into the cockpit with her.

For a moment, she thinks he’s going to kiss her, right there, right while everything is frozen around them. But he sits down instead, pulling her onto his lap and reaching around her to lower the hatch again and she doesn’t think twice as she leans back against his chest and eases the X-wing back into flight.

“Must be nice, having your own personal Force user to block blasts being fired at you,” Paige teases.

“Cheating is what I call it,” Poe replies.

“Let’s just get out of here, please,” Rey says. Ben’s arm is around her waist, his eyes are pressed against the crook of her neck and he’s warm and solid underneath her.

 

-

 

She waits until they’ve made the jump to hyperspace before she turns off the commlink. The moment she does, she turns as much as she can in the seat to face him, pressing her forehead to his. The seat is not designed for two people—not even a little bit—but she doesn’t care. His ‘fresher hadn’t been designed for two people either. She is completely fine with melting into him as needed.

He’s thinner now than he had been when she’d last seen him, and there are dark exhausted circles under his eyes. “Are you hungry?” she asks. There are some Reythan crackers in a storage near their feet, but before she can reach down to grab some for him, his lips are on hers. He is trembling underneath her, and he clings to Rey.

“He’s dead,” she whispers into his lips. “He’s dead, Ben, he’s gone, he’s never coming back.”

He’s trying to kiss her, but he’s sobbing now—relief she thinks, and it’s not long before she reaches up and pulls his head down so that it’s buried against her neck again. “I love you,” he moans into her neck. “I love you and I—I was so scared you’d hate me for disappearing like that, thinking I’d hated you, that I was avoiding you, that I was too mad to care about you.”

“Hush,” she tells him, but he just keeps crying. She strokes his hair. It’s not soft now—it’s greasy and lank and long. _I’m washing him clean the second we get back to base,_ Rey thinks. _I’m going to hold him and never let him go._

When he’s calmed down slightly, she asks, “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he whispers. “I mean—I do. I used the Force and it was enough for him to find me. He’s always been too powerful to match and just a few moments and it was enough.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “One second I was on my way to work, the next I was waking up in a prison cell and he was there in my head again, working his way through memories of everything he’d missed, memories of _you_.” His hands tighten in her jumpsuit and he’s crying again, deep shuddering sobs and now it’s Rey clinging to him, peppering his oily hair with kisses as he cries into her neck.

“I’m here. I’m here. I’m here with you.”

And she holds him until he stops crying, until he falls asleep.

 

-

 

“I should have you all discharged for this,” is the first thing that Rey hears when she pulls out of hyperspace and reconnects her commlink. “But I rather suspect the entire Resistance would hand my ass to me if I did. So I suppose all I can do is say well done, soldiers.”

“We can say it was your idea,” Poe tells the General. “They’d believe it, too. It’s your son, after all.”

She hears the General’s breath hitch. “You got him out?”

“He’s with me,” Rey says quietly. Ben is still asleep underneath her, his heart pumping lazy life against her back.

The General is silent for a long moment. Then she hears a sound she recognizes all too well because the General sounds _exactly_ like her son when she chokes out a relieved sob.

 

-

 

Rey kisses him awake. “We’re landing,” she whispers to him.

“Is this a dream?” he mumbles into her lips.

“No,” she tells him. “I’m here and you’re safe. I promise you’re safe.”

He hugs her and opens his eyes and he looks so very tired but his eyes seem to glow at her through the darkness.

She climbs out of the cockpit first. Poe and Finn and Jessika and Paige are already standing with the General, watching her. Kaydel and Rose are with them as well, both looking strained yet excited. She stands on the ladder and helps Ben up before continuing her way down to the floor of the hangar and taking off her helmet.

When Ben lands on the ground next to her, straightening to his full height and stretching he freezes, his eye on the little braid that’s tucked into her bun. His eyes go bright, his nostrils flare, his lips tremble, and he reaches a shaking hand up to run fingers along it. But before Rey has time to step into his arms, press her face into his chest and hold him, his mother is standing there and Ben’s attention snaps to her now.

They stare at one another a long time, mother and son. She is so much shorter than he is, but he seems smaller in her presence somehow. Then, tentatively, Leia Organa steps forward and reaches a hand up to cup his cheek and he melts over her in an all-consuming hug.

 

-

 

Rey steps into the ‘fresher with him. The one on the _Raddus_ is, impossibly, smaller than the one in his tiny apartment, but neither of them care at all as Rey washes his hair and he runs soap over the rest of his body. His muscles have atrophied. The eight-pack is gone, and she can count his ribs. She cares more about the latter than the former. She knows what it is to starve.

Ben has his own room, since he’s not a Resistance recruit, and Rey doesn’t care at all if it’s not standard protocol but she climbs into bed right next to him and curls herself against him. She runs her hands through his drying hair, weaving it into braids of her own invention because it’s long enough for some good ones now and it is not long before he falls asleep again.

 

-

 

He sleeps for two days straight and when he wakes, Rey drags him to the mess hall to eat his weight in rations. People watch them closely. Ben has been the center of conversation since they’d taken off to rescue him, and now he’s got weird braids in his hair that are sticking out in all directions because they’d dried wet. He hadn’t let Rey take them out before they’d gone to the mess, though. He’d just run his thumb along the braid in her hair again and shaken his head and she’d gotten a shiver down her spine.

 

-

 

The First Order collapses without Snoke. It was not an organization designed to exist without a leader, and not one of Snoke’s generals is equal to the task. Rey enjoys watching Snoke’s kingdom crumble to ash, but she keeps her joy private. Ben avoids conversations about politics, avoids training regimens that would benefit from someone who’s had as much training as he’s had. He spends most of his time in his room with his holopad or with his mother or with Rey.

They haven’t had sex since she rescued him, but she doesn’t think it’s from a lack of love. She remembers how it felt to have Snoke showing her memories of the two of them entwined together. She’d rather sleep curled up with her head on his chest if it means that he’s not thinking of Snoke in any way.

 

-

 

When they return to Hosnian Prime, Rey freezes as they’re descending from the transport. “I forgot to tell you—you got fired. They have back pay for you though.”

Ben blinks at her, exhaling in a sharp breath as though he had completely forgotten about life before his capture. “Well…” he says slowly. “I guess I should go get that.” He gives her an odd look.

“What happens next?” she asked him quietly, peeking up at him through her lashes and reaching out to run her hand along his side.

Ben took a deep breath—not a shuddering one. A steadying one. Slowly, light dawned across his face. “How much of the stars do you want to see? Because I want to see them all.”

 

-

 

He makes her see stars.

Their first night out on a ship that his mother insisted he take, he kisses her until she’s breathless, peeling away layers of clothes and laying her down on the only bunk that the tiny ship has. He sucks at the skin of her neck until she wonders if he can taste the way her heart feels in her chest through her pulsing blood.

 _I love you,_ she thinks as his hands rub up and down her sides. _I love you, I love you, I love you._

He pauses in kissing her and something warm and wordless and Ben floods her heart when she looks up into his eyes. He looks almost relaxed, but more importantly she sees his lips quirk up towards a smile and she knows why.

“You’re safe,” she whispers to him. “I will keep you safe. Nothing will stop me.” And now it’s her lips at his throat and she pushes him so that he’s lying flat on the bed and it’s her hovering over him, the tips of her breasts brushing deliciously against his chest.

His fingers thread through her hair, tracing circles into her scalp as his lips find a corner of her forehead, as he shifts underneath her so that she can feel the press of his erection against her stomach.

Without letting her lips leave his neck, she straddles him, running her slit up and down his shaft as she rocks back and forth, her stomach sliding against his, her heart to his, her lips kissing in time with the pulse in his neck. Ben moans and his hands go still in her hair and she grins against his skin.

_I want you to feel good. I want you to feel so good you forget everything but right now._

_Please,_ his voice is ragged even in her mind and it’s all she needs. She kisses her way down his chest, nipping at each freckle she finds. She drags her body down his so that he can feel the weight of her, the heat of her as she goes until her face is pressed against the base of his cock. She licks a hot wet stripe along it, and when she reaches the tip and presses her tongue against the little hole at the center, his whole body jerks with the sensation of it and a little bit of precum dribbles out to her tongue. She glances up at him and his eyes are closed. He’s thrown an arm over his eyes so that his face rests in the crook of his elbow. His lips are parted, his cheeks are flushed, and his breathing is ragged. And Rey smiles as she draws him into her mouth, sliding his tip along the soft side of her cheek until it reaches the back, then relaxing her throat as much as she can and taking him in as deeply as she can manage, her nose nuzzling into the wiry hair at the base of his cock.

“Rey,” he chokes out, and Rey rubs a circle into his thigh with her thumb. Then she takes his balls into her other hand and squeezes them lightly as she pulls her head back away from his cock until it’s just her tongue tracing the tip of him again, drinking in the precum that he’s leaking now.

He’s rocking almost unconsciously into her face as she continues to suck him between her lips. She can feel his legs tensing next to her and when she glances up at him again, his abdomen is flexing.

She pulls her lips away from him, releasing his balls and pumping at his dick gently, her hand wet from her own saliva. He pulls his arm away from his face and looks down at her.

 _I,_ he begins to think, but it’s not long before he gives up trying to find words and takes a deep breath, a calming one, an _I don’t want to come just yet_ sort of breath.

Rey smiles and brings her lips back down to his cock and her hand drops—not to his balls—but to his ass, nudging his hips up a little higher so that she can trace her own saliva against him.

 _That’s not going to be enough,_ he thinks and she pauses, looking up at him. She pops her mouth off his dick and spits onto her fingers and traces the hole again.

He breaths in sharply when she presses a finger in, his muscles clenching tightly around her. “Too much?” she asks. _Enough lubrication?_

“I…” he breathes for just a moment then shakes his head. “Not now, ok?” _Another time, just not now._

She pulls herself from him immediately and he is sitting up, his hands coming to cup her face and at the taste of his lips, she knows she’s done blowing him for the night. His tongue twines with hers as she straddles him again, rubbing her slit over his shaft again. He pauses in kissing her just long enough to look down and line himself up to her before she sinks onto him, sinks _into_ him with a sigh.

 _You make me feel alive again,_ he thinks, and it’s the last lucid thought she catches from him before she starts to rock her hips against him, before lets conscious thought lose itself to moans and grunts and his hands clutch at her back, holding her as close as she can. She can barely remember the time when she thought his tongue in her mouth felt strange; nothing could feel more natural now. She breathes him in, takes him in, presses herself against him until she can’t tell where she ends and he begins.

When his lips do at last leave hers it’s to find that spot on her neck again, which he sucks with enthusiasm as his hands come to cup at her breasts, to twist lightly at her nipples until her heart is racing even more than she thought it could. The sound of her sex sliding on and off his fills the room, mixed with his groans and her gasps. Rey weaves her fingers through his hair, meaning for the motion to be gentle but when he slides his hand down between them to rub at her clit she ends up tugging more than she’d meant to. He hisses and she lets go at once and a moment later he’s laughing and nudging into her neck again with his nose. “No, I liked it.”

So she puts her hands back and when he drops his lips across her chest to suck at one of her nipples, to take practically her whole breast into his mouth while his finger works her clit and she rides him, she holds onto his hair until her whole body is contracting and he has her seeing stars.

It takes her a moment for her heart to slow enough for her to be aware that somewhere in the midst of her coming, he’d come to, hot and hard and wet inside her. She lets herself fall sideways onto the bunk and burrows into the crook of his neck, grinning when he twists on his side to wrap his arms around her.

It’s as he’s weaving a braid into her hair that she whispers, “You liked me tugging at your hair like that?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, be careful. I don’t want you to pull it out. But that felt good.”

Rey grins into his throat. “How do you know I don’t just want to give you an excuse to wear that dumb blond wig again?”

He freezes. Then she feels rumbling in his chest that could be laughter or could be a growl and she can’t for the life of her determine which it is when he says, “Don’t you _dare_.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Also hi here's my [tumblr](http://crossingwinter.tumblr.com/reylo).


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